Awesome Indies /Indie Gold – excellent books by independently published authors.
With a limited budget and a voracious appetite for books, I often buy ebooks by Indie authors and publishers because they can sell them more cheaply than bigger publishers. It doesn’t take long reading the 99c to $4.99 books to discover that some Indie books are fantastic and some are crap. It’s always a joy to strike gold and a disappointment to find that you have paid for something that should never have been published.
I read reviews before I buy, but frankly I don’t trust reviewers unless they know something about writing, and when I see 5 star reviews for badly written books, it’s obvious that a lot of people don’t know what good writing really is. I long for a site that lists Indie books that have the tick of approval from other writers, a tick that tells me that no matter whether I like the subject matter or not, the book is well written, a tick that tells me that I won’t throw the book across the room shouting in frustration, “why didn’t the author hire an editor!”
I found sites that list 4 and 5 star books based on reader reviews, but none where the evaluation was done by other writers. Since I believe that there’s a need for such a site, to get the ball rolling I’ve made a list of books that I and other authors and editors can unreservedly recommend. My idea is to honour the Indie authors who produce a high quality product and to direct readers towards the Indie Gold that lies hidden amongst the avalanche of available books. Consider this your treasure map.
Visit the Awesome Indies site here
I will say it again, this is an awesome idea! Thanks, Tahlia!
A great initiative for those that make the grade, and another kick for those that don’t, but standards need to be set. I support your initiative, and I wish the site every success. Everything rather depends on how good your selected reviewers are, but then nearly everything to do with books is subjective.
Hi Richard, thanks for the support. I agree that the reviewers qualifications are of prime importantance and I’m confident that I’m keeping the standard up, by being pretty picky with who I’ll accept reviews from. I’m not into kicking those who don’t ‘make the grade’, I’m into promoting those who have gone that little bit further and deserve to be credited for it. Those who don’t get the required review on one book will hopefully learn from the criticism they get and do better with their next book. Also, if an author doesn’t get the required view from one ‘qualified’ reviewer, they can try another. If I’m not sure, I’ll ask another author to read the book as well. In the end, readers will decide for themselves what they want to read and that’s how it should be.
Thanks, Tahlia for this. A great, great idea! What does the 5-Star system mean, anyway?
It’s different for different people, of course, but if you’re reviewing to a set criteria that isn’t simply whether you like it or not, then it should give an indication of quality.
Hi Tahlia, When I hover over the Awesome Indies graphic, nothing happens. I’m looking for the list of books by genre you mentioned. Am I missing something?
Just click on the image and it will take you to the site.
I just realised that this is an old post, written when the list was on this site. It now has a site to itself. The link is now in the post.
This is terrific – thanks so much for including my book ‘Nobody’s Fault’ on your site. I love the way you say, so honestly, that some ‘indie’ books are fantastic, and some are crap! So good to know I’m not the only one who gets frustrated by badly written works being given loads of 4 & 5 star reviews by people who can’t tell if a book is well written or not.
I hope that sites like this will help to separate the wheat from the chaff, in the way that Amazon reviews so often don’t. Nice one!
Thanks for your comment Terry. What we need most now that the systems are up and running is people talking about the site so that readers come to know it as a good place to buy their books. There’s a few already who have told me that they buy all their indie books through the links here. When we have like that the authors will really start to feel the benefits of being listed here, but there’s a lot of talking to be done to get that happening. The name needs to be dropped in discussions, blog posts & comments, kindle forums, wherever it’s appropriate.
Thanks Tahlia for setting up this great site- it really helps authors to gain credibility – happy to do some name dropping!
Thanks Elisabeth